Stuart R. Ainsworth

 Manager of newly-formed Database Administration group for a financial security company.  Former Data Architect; 6 years working primarily in a development department  Prior experience as DBA and a reporting/database developer  AtlantaMDF Chapter Leader

 Experience as a database developer  Scrum in the workplace  Scrum BOF meetings at TechED  Review of literature  Promotion to Manager  Stack of work  Needed to find a way to manage the workload

 Cover Agile development principles  Extend Agile philosophy to DBA work  Suggest methods of managing DBA work.

Agile Principles

In February 2001, 17 software developers met at the Snowbird, Utah resort, to discuss lightweight development methods. They published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development to define the approach now known as agile software development.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

 Do what you HAVE to do, then do what you WANT to do.  Get these out of order, and you’ll probably wind up in jail  Agile methods are like algebra…  Work according to the principles first.  Choose the method by which you want to work.

Agile Principles ScrumXP Agile Unified Process Feature Driven Dev

Agile Methods

 Product Backlog  Release Backlog  Scrum Backlog  Burndown chart  Daily Standup (Scrum)  Sprint Retrospective  yer_embedded&v=XU0llRltyFM yer_embedded&v=XU0llRltyFM 

 What’s the most popular form of agile development in use today?  ScrumBut

Database Administration

 We’re still talking about development at this point; what happened to Database Administration?  We’re going to be agile in our approach to agile. ▪ Borrow what we can, discard the rest. ▪ Focus on communication, shared ownership  What are the key differences between them? ▪ Development is product-focused ▪ Administration is service-focused

 Presentation at Tech-ED 2011  table table  Joel Semeniuk and Steve Forte  OK to mix-and-match, but adhere to principles

 Scrum is cyclical  Tasks over period of time  Most work estimated before sprint starts ▪ Always some percentage of new work ▪ Estimates may not be valid  IT Mgmt (including DBA) is more reactive  Tasks come as needed  Difficult to estimate small projects

AGILE PRINCIPLES Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. IT MANAGEMENT PROCESS Team interaction Business interaction Simple, flexible processes Measure “cost-of-change” Team must “buy in” to process Team members should play to their strengths.

 Daily Standups  Consistent touchpoints  Don’t ignore spontaneous conversations  Task Assignment  Work items have phases  Team members have assignments

Managing the Work

Agile Principles ScrumXP Agile Unified Process Feature Driven Dev

Agile Principles ScrumXP Agile Unified Process Feature Driven Dev Lean IT Kanban

 Literally means “sign board” in Japanese  Modeled after manufacturing methodology  Developed by Toyota  Based on lean models (simple and effective)  Not specifically “agile”  Consistent with agile principles  Can be used in conjunction with other methods

 Start with what you do now  Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change  Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles

 Visualize the workflow  Limit WIP  Manage flow  Make Process Policies Explicit  Improve Collaboratively

 Story Card (Work)  Phases  Swimlanes  WIP  Reporting

   Low-cost (free) project boards  We chose LeanKit  More users at free level  Better reporting  Swimlanes

 DEMO

 In the beginning….  Story Card (Work) – Each story represents 4 hours of work  Excludes daily repetitious tasks ▪ Monitoring ▪ Maintenance  Daily Standups to review cards  Product Owners invited

 Phases – Actual steps of workflow  Doing – Things we’re actually working on.  To Do – Things we’ll do next.  Done – Tasks that are complete.  Backlog – Half-baked ideas/stories  Archive – Stuff that’s really done  Doing (Waiting) – Things we need to pause on  Handoff to Dev – Things we can’t fix; off to devs.

 Swimlanes – we don’t use them (yet)  WIP –  To Do: 4 per team member  Doing (Active) 2 stories per member, -1 per team  Doing (Waiting) 1 per member ▪ Standups allow shift of priority

 Reporting  Cycle Time – how long it takes for a story to move from “To Do” to “Done”  Cumulative Flow – flow of work from phase to phase and growth over time

 Things change…  Not enough depth in reporting  No vision into WHERE efforts were being spent  Great for tracking bugs, but not for insight into “heading off fires”

Maintenance Traditional DBA work Monitoring; performance tuning Architecture Conceptual & Logical Business needs to data infrastructure Research & Development Best Practices Proofs of concept Support Why won’t this….? Configuration changes

 Cards are now typed by categories  Card base unit is 1 hour  Card size increments in hours  WIP in lanes based on card, not size  Backlog is no longer used  Added new reports  Card distribution (percentage)  Reports now demonstrate overages

SCRUM  Cyclical  Time-Boxed  Change is expected  Fundamental shift in processes KANBAN OOpen-ended WWork-boxed CChange is irrelevant CCan be used in conjunction with existing processes

scrum-minibook with-tfs-2010